He’s the first man to ever win three Oscars. Daniel Day Lewis, that is.

For the entire filming of My Left Foot, he didn’t leave his wheelchair, sound coherent, or even feed himself. For Last of the Mohicans he became a survivalist. He lived off the land. For In the Name of the Father, he lived in a prison cell. He starved himself. He asked the cast to insult and abuse him.

When playing Abraham Lincoln, he even signed his texts “A.”

Daniel’s style of acting, called method acting, expects him to become his character. To live in their skin. Which is a potent skill to have as a marketer.

Not launching can be painful, but not learning can be fatal – Drew Houstan, Founding CEO of Dropbox

“Not launching can be painful, but not learning can be fatal.” That’s how Drew Houston, the founding CEO of Dropbox, describes his team’s approach. Dropbox, if you haven’t heard of them, does file-sharing in the cloud.

They give users access to the same files on all devices, regardless of where they are used.

After interviewing their geeky friends in MIT dorm rooms, the Dropbox founders wanted “write once, read anywhere” file management to apply to all files. Not just a software developer’s source code. They started working on developing a working prototype to solve their own problem.

When Dropbox launched, a number of cloud storage competitors with deep pockets already existed: Google Drive, iCloud, AWS, Carbonite, to name a few. To get their product off the ground, Dropbox had to be different. And simple to understand.

Result: Pass. The team was able to acquire traffic that converted based on a description on a landing page. At the same time, they were building prototypes to assess the technical viability of the product idea. As this initial market test proved that some pent up demand existed, the team dug further.

Step Back: This test established baselines, which could then be used to explore the product presentation further. Also, it helped them reach out and establish contact with their market, independently of their immediate personal network, thus providing a slightly more unbiased signal. Also, using such a page potentially allowed them to test a path to market, to locate their most rabid fans.

As part of their application to YCombinator, Dropbox really wanted to get Paul Graham’s attention. So they created a video aimed at attracting early adopters. The goal was to explain the product concept as a story. The core differentiator (big idea as they call it) was “write once, read anywhere”. Make changes to any copy, and all copies are updated with the same changes.

Test Type: Value or Growth hypothesis

Success Criteria: signups > X or conversion rate > X% (established previously) — more accurately in Dropbox’s case it was to get accepted into the YCombinator accelerator program.

Result: Pass. Built list of around 5,000 interested prospects. The problem description resonated strongly with their targeted early adopter audience.

Step Back: Moving to a video format helped get across the product’s story more effectively. This made it more accessible to everyone. In and of itself, an explainer video is just a change in format–similar to how a bestselling book is treated as a candidate to become a blockbuster movie. Ultimately, a landing page that tests demand much get across the story well. The medium for telling that story is secondary to the relevance and quality of that story to the target audience.

As Dropbox’s initial target audience was quite technical, this explanation mapped to a number of tools and behaviors they already knew from software development. And they were more than happy to run with the write once, read anywhere concept. Arguably, this niche perceived other cloud storage as defective because it didn’t support this kind of functionality. As a result, they needed little convincing and persuasion to hop on board.

Hypothesis: Paid search can be a profitable engine of growth for Dropbox

Test Type: Growth hypothesis

Success Criteria: Customer Value > Customer Acquisition Cost

Traffic Source: Paid search engine marketing

Dropbox experimented with using paid acquisition on a landing page. This is not an early-stage landing page MVP test. It’s an attempt to figure out what will grow the company, not whether the product idea is attractive. They hired an experienced search engine marketer, who went out and made landing pages. On those pages, they hid the free option, replacing it with a free time-limited trial.

Result: Fail. As their cost of acquisition at the time was at least $233 for a $99 product, the experiment to test paid acquisition as a profitable traffic source failed. Based on the economics of paid search, pay-per-click didn’t look like a viable growth strategy for Dropbox.

Step back: Even though PPC as a source of traffic didn’t work for them, it solidified their confidence in their ability to retain customers.

If people bought, their subscription retention rate was over 75%. In short, they had a great product their community loved, and they had product market fit. In Drew Houston’s words, this meant that “product-market fit cures the many sins of management.” After this idea failed, Dropbox created a famous explainer video which went viral, thus proving that a viral engine of growth was better for them.

Hypothesis: A simple value proposition resonates more with the target audience than a complex one

Test Type: Value hypothesis

Success Criteria: Conversion rate > initial conversion rate

Traffic Source: Paid search engine marketing

Simpler the better!

Result: Pass. Simple and concise converts better, as does having a clear call-to-action for the next step.

Step back: This test type is taken out of the traditional toolbox of conversion rate optimization (CRO).

The idea is clear to the founders. They want to communicate it as concisely and effectively as possible to their target audience. Even if they move to a different traffic source later (as Dropbox did), a clear and powerful value proposition ensures a high conversion rate for all further marketing efforts, including free traffic sources. Moving too early into this kind of testing can be a type of premature optimization.

The Takeaways

The key tactic Dropbox used was to to test both market and technical viability simultaneously. In addition, they did a number of smaller tests. Each test checked a much smaller piece of the bigger puzzle. This required them to break down the overall vision into discrete tests which they built and ran.

Build -> Measure -> Learn

By running a series of experiments, Dropbox stayed with the ethos of MVP=experiment. Each cycle around the Build, Measure, Learn loop gave them greater insight. Each step they took tested something new about their target market and their product.

As a result the product evolved very quickly, because the team gathered actionable yet counter-intuitive data. This helped them build a strong USP (unique selling proposition) in a crowded marketplace using technology that was theoretically possible but unproven.

There is a lot more to a minimum viable product than just a beta software release. This post aims to make that clearer.

Here are a few homepages of today’s tech giants from their early days. The homepages serve as a poignant reminder of the fact that it’s better to launch as quickly as possible when you are in a good market, rather than honing the perfect look and design. If you cut across the technology industry, the whole idea of a “minimum love-able product” just doesn’t hold up to the backstories of the major players in the sector.

Every major tech company below had quite humble beginnings, where they focused on learning, iterating, and building a viable business around a product idea. Once they knew they were viable, they went back and optimized product design.

These homepages serve as a good reminder of what Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke said, “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”. You could easily argue that that the real test of a business is whether it survives its first major pivot. Yet in order to pivot using a Lean Startup approach, you gather data to confirm your intuitions.

Also, if the founders had not explicitly formulated an experiment around their landing page, the below are not really landing page MVPs. They’re just homepages. To find out more about building your own landing page MVP experiment, check out Launch Tomorrow.

Google

Before Alphabet there was Google, and before Google there was…Backrub.

This was a prototype of the search service that took over the online world.

Initial days of Google!

In the early days of Google, the designers would occasionally get an email from a strange fan containing just one number. That was it. Every few months or so, they got another one of these emails and they were confused why this oddball was emailing them numbers.

Eventually, they realized that the email always came the day after the changed their main homepage design. The number referred to the number of characters visible on the main screen. Their email stalker was helping them stay true to their minimalist style.

[image: Mark Chen]

Twitter

Paper prototype, basis for the homepage of Twitter

This picture is from Jack Dorsey’s notebook, before the twitter guys actually put up their first version of their homepage. Paper prototypes are good sources of discussion, and they are useful for communicating the value proposition–which in Twitr’s case at the time was their biggest challenge. After all, who would even want to write 140 character long blog posts?

[image:medium.com]

keeping tabs on friends, good early days of Twitter!

This early homepage stresses twitter’s function of serving as a way to keep tabs on friends. The value proposition was that you will know what others are doing.

[image:onemonthrails.com]

Amazon

Consistently low prices and greater chances of availability of books at Amazon.

Founder Jeff Bezos claimed, “one million titles, consistently low prices”–a claim physical bookstores couldn’t really make, as detailed in Launch Tomorrow. As a result, Amazon became the go-to place for consumers who were browsing slightly less popular books in the “long tail”, knowing that there would be a much greater chance that the book would be available.

[image: Mark Chen]

Facebook

the first look!

This is how Facebook looked, when Mark Zuckerburg decided to create an electronic form of the Freshman Facebook, arguably as a way to gain notoriety on campus at the time. Seems quite far from the billion dollar advertising juggernaut it is today.

[image:waybackmachine.org]

Here’s how the user profile looked after login

[image:onemonthrails.com]

Apple

Who can believe this is Apple Computer? Yes the same Apple from today.

While clearly not a landing page, as the Internet didn’t exist at the time, Steve Jobs and Woz arranged to sell 50 assembled computers to the Byte Shop (a computer store in Mountain View, California) at $500 each, despite not having the parts. To fulfill the $25,000 order, they obtained $20,000 in parts at 30 days net and delivered the finished product in 10 days.

This was in a day when home computers were assembled from scratch by wide-eyed hobbyists. A classic pre-sell MVP lies at the beginning of the Apple empire.

[image:Wikipedia.org]

YouTube

“Tune in Hook Up” to 100 million videos daily on myriad subjects

Youtube had its roots as a dating site before focusing specifically on video. YouTube fizzled in an early version, namely a dating site called “Tune In Hook Up”. The founders later developed the current site, now broadcasting 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects.

[image:waybackmachine.org]

PayPal

Uniqueness of Idea that sending money to someone using their email address, we call it PayPal.

Before Peter Thiel became “The Peter Thiel”, he ran around doing customer development trying to convince people to beam money between PalmPilots. Over infrared. It was only when they realized that people really latched on to the idea that sending money to someone using their email address, did they have a value proposition that actually worked.

[image:waybackmachine.org]

Yahoo

First directory of links of the world wide web

Yahoo was originally the first directory of links of the world wide web, before search engines even existed. The founders manually curated links and organized them into a tree structure to make them easy to find and use.

[image:onemonthrails.com]

AirBnB

An idea that counts, renting mattresses opened way to progress.

The idea for AirBnb came from the founders’ need to get cash for their other startup ideas. They offered to rent out an air mattress to ISDA conference (a design conference) attendees. When they found that surprisingly easy, they continued to do so, only to realize later…that this was their big idea.

[image: YC/Jessica Livingston]

And the takeaway is…

Design remains quite important, particularly for consumer technology companies. But over-designing a product before proving demand exists is just an elaborate form of waste. Premature optimization, even.

A minimum loveable product is a great idea. As a principle, I myself find it quite alluring to only show your absolute best to the world. From a business point of view in the tech sector, though, it may be a trap.

So go figure out what you need to prove and write your first experiment! Grab the first few chapters of my book Launch Tomorrow, totally free!